• Israeli occupation forces gather at the immersive theater set known as the Urban Warfare Training Center or “Mini Gaza” at Wadi al-Sayal (Tze’elim), an-Naqab (Negev) desert, occupied Palestine, Jan. 4, 2022. Photo: Oded Balilty/Associated Press.

    The shadow art world: Rehearsing genocide

    The economic machinations of the art world are often obscured, even if they remain largely traceable through commercial galleries, fairs, auction houses, cultural foundations, contemporary art institutions, public museums, educational platforms, and the like.

  • An AI-generated image of a downed F-35 published on social media by Iranian Tasnim News Agency on June 14, 2025. Source: X.com

    Eating the future: The Metabolic logic of AI slop

    An image of a downed U.S. F-35 jet—wings destroyed, afterburner still glowing—starts to trend.

  • Bertolt Brecht, journal (detail), August 24, 1940. Courtesy the Bertolt Brecht Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (BBA 0277/037).

    Fragments from damaged life: Bertolt Brecht’s Collages

    Every intellectual in exile is mutilated, wrote Theodor W. Adorno in California during World War II.

  • “Fig. 18 Cumulus (cumulo-nimbus),” International Cloud Atlas (1896).

    The nuclear geopolitics of anthropogenic clouds

    Among the various types of anthropogenic clouds, mushroom clouds that form in the sky after atomic bomb explosions are arguably the most spectacular.

  • Kama La Mackerel, Femme in Public, From Thick Skin to Femme Armour. Photo: Võ Thiên Việt.

    Our Own Words: Fem & Trans, Past & Future

    Words for different flavors of trans people come and go, gathering different assortments of us together and drawing different lines between us.

  • March for Our Lives 24 March 2018 in NYC, People Over Profits sign, Central Park West, AMNH, Manhattan

    Discourses of Distrust: Conspiracy Theories and the Critique of Ideology

    Here the main question is not what is said but why it is said. And this question of why is not related to the personal situation, interests, or discursive strategies of the speakers. Men cannot know what is good for them; they very often profess ideologies that are directly detrimental to their interests.

  • Tsunami Ruins, Japan, 2011. Photo: CC BY 2.0/Yisris.

    Revolution or ruin

    We know how the first paragraph begins. We’ve read about the changing climate for over twenty years, infrequently at first and then daily until we couldn’t deny it any longer. The world is burning.

  • An image allegedly taken after the destruction of Monument to the Victory of the people of Slavonia in Croatia, 1992.

    Only intelligent planning can save us

    Universalism is not an innocent concept. In “The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism,” published shortly after the fall of historical communism, Ágnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, former Marxist philosophers and disciples of Georg Lukács, accused Marx and his followers of turning the Hegelian concept of universalism into a philosophy of praxis, a “predictive and action-orienting device” applied to change the world.